Vaccine Profits Minted 9 New Billionaires While Vaccine Apartheid Drove Omicron

TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN:Today is the last day of the World Economic Forum. Many of the world’s wealthiest people and world leaders have been gathering virtually this week for the annual event that normally takes place in Davos, Switzerland. Due to the pandemic, the forum was held online for its second consecutive year. Dr. Michael Ryan, World Health Organization, warned participants earlier this week about the growing inequity in vaccines.

DR. MICHAEL RYAN: If we look at the population of the world in total, over half of the world’s population has received two doses of vaccine. Our African regional office reports that only 7% have received two doses of vaccines. The reality is that 70% of the world is moving towards this goal, but large swathes are still behind.

AMY GOODMAN:John Nkengasong was the director of Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He also spoke at a virtual World Economic Forum.

JOHN NKENGASONG:What we have seen in the last two years has been a total collapse of global solidarity and cooperation. There is absolutely no reason for Africa to be behind in immunizations, with 7% of its population fully vaccinated, a continent that has 1.2 billion inhabitants. It’s totally unacceptable.

AMY GOODMAN:This is Oxfam. reports the world’s 10 richest men saw their wealth double during the pandemic, from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, while the incomes of 99% of the world’s population dropped. Oxfam declared, “Widening economic, gender, and racial inequalities — as well as the inequality that exists between countries — are tearing our world apart,” unquote. This has led to growing calls for a wealth tax on the world’s billionaires.

Well, to look at some of the billionaires taking part in the World Economic Forum, we’re joined by New York TimesPeter Goodman, correspondent and author of the new book Davos Man: How billionaires have devoted the world to them.

Peter, talk about what inspired you to write this book. Talk about the people who were in Davos, and their impact on the world.

PETER GOODMAN: Yeah, you bet. Thank you for having me.

The reality that we are in the midst of a global emergency, as you correctly report, is what inspired the book. And it’s an emergency — I’m of course referring to the pandemic — that has been extended, worsened, intensified by the reality that a handful of people, the billionaire class — the people I refer to in the book as “Davos Man,” which comes from attendees of the World Economic Forum, you know, this glittering gathering of the most powerful, wealthy people on Earth — these are the people who have rigged our system so that most of the wealth flows in their direction, at the direct expense everyone else.

I think vaccines are a great example. I mean, it’s well and good that in Davos they’re talking about vaccine inequity, just like they talk about climate change and gender imbalance and systematic racism and voting rights and all sorts of other super important issues about which they not only do very little — I mean, they put out some great reports — but then they go home, these participants, and they commence the battle to protect their privileges, to prevent actual redistribution of wealth. You know, the forum convenes under the mantra “committed to improving the state of the world,” which is a handy phrase that connotes change. These are the ultimate beneficiaries to the status quo.

Look at the fact we have frontline medical personnel who are available to treat COVID patients in places like South Asia and Africa while we’re boosting children in the United States, you know, that sort of tells you everything we need to know, because we’ve accepted one of the key talking points of Davos Man, that we either affirm the system we’ve got, where pharmaceutical executives get to sell their vaccines to the highest bidder, they monopolize the gains of publicly financed research for their own benefit, and the result is this gaping, lopsided distribution — that is not only a humanitarian catastrophe, it’s a catastrophe even for people in wealthy countries, because it’s an open invitation to the Omicron variant. We are paying the monopoly royalties for vaccines to companies like Pfizer through our closed schools and disruption to our children’s education, through death, fear and hits to economic livelihood. That’s why I wrote the book.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why don’t you lay out who these men are?

PETER GOODMAN:My book is about five Davos Men. However, I could have picked 20 more and ended up with the exact same story. I focus on Marc Benioff, who’s the CEOSalesforce, the Silicon Valley Software Company. He’s actually a member of the board of trustees at Davos, and he really encapsulates the Davos Man view. He said last year, the last time they convened virtually at the forum, that CEOs are the real heroes of the pandemic — not, mind you, frontline medical workers; CEOs — because they gave us vaccines, because financiers kept credit flowing, preventing bankruptcies. He speaks about how he pulled strings with China to locate 50,000,000 pieces of the pandemic. PPE — face masks, hand sanitizer, medical gowns — and he distributes them to frontline medical workers in the U.S. Well, that’s good. That probably actually saved people’s lives. But it’s fair to ask: Why are we dependent upon a tech bro in Silicon Valley, in the richest, most powerful country on Earth, to outfit our frontline medical workers?

And part of the explanation is that people like Marc Benioff, who does give to philanthropic pursuits, who kicked in 10 million bucks of his own money to fund a ballot initiative in San Francisco to increase services for homeless people — his company, Salesforce, has paid the modest sum of zero in federal taxes, a couple of times, on billions in revenue. This makes everything else a rounding error. I mean, how are we supposed to deal with homelessness, with the lack of affordable housing; how do we pay for the infrastructure that allows entrepreneurs like Marc Benioff to run their companies, if people don’t pay their taxes? I also quote this —

AMY GOODMAN: Let me go to Marc Benioff —

PETER GOODMAN:Yes, please.

AMY GOODMAN: — CEOSalesforce, speaking at this year’s World Economic Forum.

MARC BENIOFF:CEOs across the globe were the heroes of the pandemic. They were the ones who quickly stepped up with their financial resources, corporate resources, employees, and factories to save the planet. Just look at all the examples. PPE, building of contact tracing systems, the development of the vaccines themselves, the development of liquidity into the system to keep the financial systems floating, development of mental health systems to give — let people have mental health capabilities at critical times.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Marc Benioff, the CEOSalesforce. Your book. Davos ManBetween late March and the middle August 2020, Salesforce doubled its value, making it worth more than $225 Billion, Peter.

PETER GOODMAN: Yeah, that’s right. And, you know, look, it’s great that CEOs are talking about doing good. Some of them are doing great. And that’s terrific. But this idea that Benioff champions, along with Larry Fink, another guy I profile in my book — he’s the world’s largest asset manager. He now has $10 trillion in investments around the world. That’s pension funds. That’s university endowments. Both men support the idea that Milton Friedmanism should be over. This idea that we maximize shareholder value and then the wealth trickles through the economy and everything is fine. It’s been replaced, they tell us, by this thing that they called stakeholder capitalism. We’re catering to stakeholders now, to labor, to local communities, to society in general, to the environment. Well, that’s all well and good, but it’s always unilateral. There’s no labor unions in stakeholder capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism does not have government. It’s not a talking point. It’s all about us depending upon the goodness, the innate goodness, of people like Benioff and Fink and the other CEOs to run their companies so that everybody wins. It is this idea that pervades Davos that all solutions can be found if people are willing to debate them and come up with win-win solutions. They love win/win solutions. It eliminates the need for sacrifice. It’s all an elaborate prophylactic against the actual exercise of democracy toward the redistribution of wealth so that we can tax wealthy people and finance the things that we actually want, like expanded healthcare and affordable housing.

I focus on the book on Steve Schwarzman, who’s the world’s largest private equity magnate, worth about $35 billion, made a fortune on the foreclosure crisis in the U.S., and then around the world. He’s now vacuuming up homes again at distressed prices. He’s buying heavily in Florida. He’s turning homeowners into renters. And, you know, Davos Man style, the thing about these guys is they present themselves to us like they’re our saviors. They’re not content to just make the money; they want us to give them adulation for being the good guys and taking care of our problems — again, a preventative against policies that will hold them to account. Schwarzman made large investments in healthcare during the time leading up to the pandemic. He owns a company called TeamHealth, which is a huge staffing company that puts people in emergency rooms, where there’s just an epidemic of surprise billing — patients wheeled in, not knowing the terms of their insurance policies, discovering later that they’ve been treated by an out-of-network provider, with huge bills, collection agents hassling them. Schwarzman took advantage of the pandemic to purchase more healthcare assets.

AMY GOODMAN:According to the Financial Times, in November 2020, BlackStone founder Stephen Schwarzman defended Donald Trump’s response to the U.S. poll results during an emergency meeting of senior business leaders alarmed by the president’s claims that the election is being stolen. Financial Times describes Schwarzman as “one of Mr. Trump’s most energetic supporters on Wall Street.” Peter?

PETER GOODMAN:He funneled tens and millions of dollars into the campaigns for Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the Republican Party in general. I mean, he saw in Trump the ultimate vessel for what Davos Man cares about most, and that’s tax cuts and deregulation.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go to the world’s richest man, who completed a 10-minute suborbital flight aboard his —

PETER GOODMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — Blue Origin spacecraft last summer. After his crew landed, Jeff Bezos spoke at an information conference.

JEFF BEZOS:I want to thank all Amazon employees and customers, because you paid for all of it. I want to thank every Amazon customer and Amazon employee from the bottom of our hearts.

AMY GOODMAN:It was very revealing to see Jeff Bezos thank workers for funding this flight into space. That unforgettable image of the wealthiest man on Earth leaving Earth when the pandemic was at its peak, which we saw last year, is also very telling.

PETER GOODMAN: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. Some people point to quotes like that, or, you know, like what Benioff said about CEOs being the heroes, “Oh, this is a gaffe.” It’s not — these are not gaffes. These are direct glimpses into the worldviews and worldviews the most wealthy people in the globe, who are creating the rules for everyone.

And it was especially interesting that Bezos singled out for thanks his employees, because, you know, it would be a problem, but a smaller problem, if Bezos was worth $200 billion, and his workers at the same time weren’t doing nearly as well, but his wealth is coming because his workers are not doing well. He had much to thank them. He kept them in harm’s way during the first wave of the pandemic, knowingly, without PPEWithout protection, as COVIDWe now know that it was working its way through Amazon warehouses. When Christian Smalls — who I know you’ve covered quite a bit on your program — led a labor strike in Staten Island at a major Amazon warehouse to protest the lack of protection and the lack of paid sick leave — something that did not happen by accident: Amazon has lobbied aggressively to prevent paid sick leave from becoming the law in the United States — he was fired. Christian Smalls was fired and actually accused of violating quarantine — incredible irony given that he wanted everyone to be quarantined with pay.

And then, of course, Bezos doubles down and sends out this letter, “Dear Amazonians,” where he thanks them for their sacrifice, the warehouse workers. He applauds them for saving other people’s grandmothers, says Amazon is prioritizing the shipment of all the things that his workers don’t have, like PPE. Christian Smalls claims that this is all a hoax. They know what’s going in the boxes. The way he said it to me was, you know, it’s baking goods, it’s gaming consoles, it’s sex toys — it’s all the stuff people are buying while they’re stuck in their houses. And we are adding to Jeff Bezos’s fortune while his workers have to choose between their lives or their paychecks.

AMY GOODMAN: As these CEOs talk about their workers as stakeholders, maybe they are redefining the term “stakeholders,” as in they’re driving stakes into the workers’ and unions’ hearts. Their impact on organizing in this country? You have the horror that occurred in Illinois in December. An Amazon warehouse collapsed, killing at least six people. Labor and rights advocates blasted Amazon following the news. Union leader Stuart Appelbaum said, “Requiring workers to work through such a major tornado warning event as this was inexcusable.”

PETER GOODMAN: Yeah, that’s right. And, you know, there’s a lot of focus now on the supposed increase in labor power through the Great Resignation, the fact that there are labor shortages. Most of these shortages aren’t really shortages; they’re just workers deciding that they don’t accept the terms any longer — you know, the shortages of nurses, shortages of truck drivers. You’ll find that there are many people who can become nurses and many people who can drive trucks if you look closely. We’ve just run out of people who are willing to fall for the cons that these companies employ to try to draw people in to these impossible circumstances. And we need to remember that this current shift in the balance of power between labor and management, it could be — it could disappear as quickly as it’s materialized, because unless it turns into collective bargaining, unless it turns into rules that workers can use to actually get their fair share of the bounty of global capitalism, you know, the next crisis just very easily takes it away.

AMY GOODMAN:Jamie Dimon, Peter Goodman quickly, you can also focus on. Please explain his significance.

PETER GOODMAN: Yeah. Jamie Dimon is important on many levels. He is, of course, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank. He heads the Business Roundtable at a time when it plays a critical role in engineering Trump’s tax cuts, a $1.5 trillion package of tax cuts, lavished on people like Jamie Dimon. He’s also running the Business Roundtable as they trot out this statement of a purpose of a corporation, which embraces stakeholder capitalism. This pledge is signed by Jeff Bezos — doesn’t seem to have stopped him from mistreating his warehouse workers.

AMY GOODMAN:Also, one of your chapters from your book. Davos Man, “Taxes, Taxes, Taxes. The Rest is [B.S.]”

PETER GOODMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN:Where did the quote come?

PETER GOODMAN: Well, that quote comes from Rutger Bregman, who is this young Dutch academic, showing up at Davos for his first time, horrified that everyone is talking about philanthropy, they’re talking about win-win solutions, they’re talking about how workers have to train themselves to realize the new opportunities. These are the supposed solutions to inequality — everything except for the most obvious thing. And he says, “It’s like I’m at a firefighters conference, and no one’s allowed to talk about water.” And the remarkable thing — you know, that moment went viral. It’s possible that people saw it in their Twitter feed.

The remarkable thing was, the guy who’s running that panel, a guy named Edward Felsenthal, who’s the editor of Time magazine — recently purchased by Marc Benioff — he turns to Jane Goodall, who’s a naturalist, and says, “You know, what is it about us as a species that we can’t solve these problems?” — as if it’s some sort of deficiency with our species, while letting off the hook all the people who are actually in the room, who know well and good why this is. It’s because they don’t want to sacrifice. They don’t want to give up their money.

AMY GOODMAN:Peter Goodman, we are grateful for your support. New York Times global —

PETER GOODMAN:We are very grateful.

AMY GOODMAN: — economics correspondent. My final question: Do billionaires and trillionaires have contributed to the prolonged pandemic?

PETER GOODMAN: Oh, I don’t think there’s any question that they’ve prolonged the pandemic. The fact that we have Omicron is a direct consequence of our inability to challenge patents and to challenge the monopoly profits made by companies like Moderna and Pfizer. We have effectively subsidized those profits to the tune of our own pain. This has only exacerbated the current pandemic.

AMY GOODMAN:Thank you so much for being here.

PETER GOODMAN:We are very grateful.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Goodman, no relation, New York Times global economics correspondent. His new book, Davos Man: How billionaires have devoted the world to them.

Next, we will speak to The New Yorker’s Jane Ferguson. Her piece, “Afghanistan Has Become the World’s Largest Humanitarian Crisis.” Back in 30 seconds.